MARKETING SUSTAINMENTS
All sustainments should be marketable. A sustainment is a mechanism for bringing about significant structural change without recourse to legislative or economic regulation. This means that a sustainment must be feasible in existing conditions, even though it aims to change those conditions. In this regard a sustainment is like a bridge, with a solid grounding in both the less sustainable here and now and the more sustainable there and then. Sustainments don't just bring sustainability to the status quo (they are not market-driven), but make use of the orientation and tendencies of the status quo to bring about change (ie create new markets).
A thorough understanding of the market, of why people buy what they do, is crucial to the development of sustainments. Good marketers are in essence applied anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists. By attuning themselves to the dispositions of a sector of the population, marketers learn how to design products, environments and messages that will influence attitudes and behaviour.
A sustainment uses the skill of marketing for the development of more sustainable ways of living and working rather for the maintenance and extension of unsustainability. Sustainments require highly developed marketing skills, since they involve changing the habits of a sector of the population, rather than merely servicing their habits: anyone can sell drugs to an addict; only a truly creative marketer can sell abstinence.
One of the main problems for adept 'sustainments marketers' is finding clients; while there are some products out that might be sustainments when used in certain contexts, most products are devices that sustain unsustainable lifestyles and workpractices. A 'sustainments marketer' must therefore at this point in time be less of a service-provider to clients with pre-existing products, and more of an entrepreneur, developing the marketable services that will sustain more sustainable ways of living and working.
The EcoDesign Foundation's Master of Sustainment Design aims to teach professionals how to spot opportunities in changing markets for designing products, services and environments that could accelerate the change to more sustainable cultures and economies.
